yuck

My best friend, Dani (short for Danielle), called me yesterday. On top of telling me the baby stuff (previous post), she told me that they are having trouble with fire ants getting into their house. Her youngest son, Tristan, woke her up the other night complaining about his arms burning. When she went in to take a look, there were fire ants under his pillow. Needless to say, the exterminators have arrived. They're not messy people, but I guess fire ants find their way in no matter what. My parents aren't messy either, and every single summer they have a problem with regular black ants... which brings me to my point. Dani jinxed me! We got our apartment in March 2003 and have never had bug problems, except for the occasional wooly booger (otherwise known to me as legs-a-lot wiggleworms that looks like mutated orange centipedes) making its way in when it rains. The same darn day Dani told me that she had those fire ants in her house, I had trouble!! I was sitting on my couch playing Fable last night and my foot started itching. I scratched it by way of rubbing it along the carpet and didn't think anything else about it for the next ten minutes or so. I continued to itch, butit started to turn into itching/burning at the same time. I thought it felt different than just having an itch, especially when it started to hurt. I just happened to look down to see if I had some sort of bite, when I noticed about ten black ants under my feet. I had three very painful bites on my feet before that part was over. All I had in the house was ant traps, but that wasn't going to work immediately, obviously! I found the source - we'd dropped a piece of food on the carpet and never noticed. I got rid of the food, but they were still coming. I started killing them one-at-a-time with only a paper towel, but one got out of the towel and bit me on the thumb. It hurt right from the start (it never itched at all) and eventually turned numb, which it still is this morning. I called my mom, basically freaking out. Mom called PaPa and then my aunt to ask what to do for my bites. My aunt told me to put ice on them to keep them from swelling. My thumb still hurts right now and it's on my writing hand (left). The actual bite didn't show up until this morning, either, and boy did it hurt getting rid of it! I have been scratching all over ever since then and so has my mom. Psychological, yes, but psychology sometimes creates real physical symptoms! Josh brought home ant spray, or I probably would have slept on the balcony last night.

Thanks for jinxing me, Dani!

:::shudder:::